This volume offers a bold restatement of the importance of social history for understanding modern revolutions. The essays collected in Worlds of Labour Turned Upside Down provide global case studies examining:
- changes in labour relations as a causal factor in revolutions;
- challenges to existing labour relations as a motivating factor during revolutions;
- the long-term impact of revolutions on the evolution of labour relations.
The volume examines a wide range of revolutions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, covering examples from South-America, Africa, Asia, and Western and Eastern Europe. The volume goes beyond merely examining the place of industrial workers, paying attention to the position of slaves, women working on the front line of civil war, colonial forced labourers, and white collar workers.
Contributors are: Knud Andresen, Zsombor Bódy, Pepijn Brandon, Dimitrii Churakov, Gabriel Di Meglio, Kimmo Elo, Adrian Grama, Renate Hürtgen, Peyman Jafari, Marcel van der Linden, Tiina Lintunen, João Carlos Louçã, Stefan Müller, Raquel Varela, and Felix Wemheuer.
Pepijn Brandon, Ph.D., is a Senior Researcher at the International Institute of Social History and an Assistant Professor at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. He is a member of the Editorial Committee of the International Review of Social History.
Peyman Jafari, Ph.D., is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University where he is working on a book on the post-1973 history of oil and labor in Iran. He is the author of Der andere Iran (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2010).
Stefan Müller, Ph.D., is a Researcher at the Archive of Social Democracy of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation and Lecturer (Privatdozent) at the University of Duisburg-Essen. His research focusses on labour history and oral history in the 20th century.
All interested in the history of labour relations, global labour history, and the history of revolutions, including their (long term) impact on social relations.